The coronavirus spreading across the globe could become a constant presence, a leading World Health Organization official has said.

During a media briefing in Geneva, Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO's health emergencies program, warned Wednesday that the disease may join the mix of viruses that kill people around the world every year.

"This virus just may become another endemic virus in our communities and this virus may never go away. HIV hasn't gone away," Rya...

The global pandemic that we are living poses a major challenge for society at all levels. In these moments of uncertainty, IRB Barcelona has put what it knows best, cutting-edge research, at the service of the public.

IRB Barcelona’s efforts are focused on two lines of action. The first is participation in the mass PCR-based screening initiative of the Orfeu Programme, driven by  the Government of Catalonia, in collaboration with the research centres CRG, IBEC and CNAG.

The ...

A test to find out whether people have been infected with coronavirus in the past has been approved by health officials in England.

Public Health England said the antibody test, developed by Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche, was a "very positive development".

The blood test looks for antibodies to see if a person has already had the virus and might now have some immunity.

Until now, officials have said such tests are not reliable enough.






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Lecturer Maite López, from the Research Group Virtual Worlds Visualization and Artificial Intelligence (WAI) of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the UB, worked on a simple simulation model to explain in a disseminating way how the COVID-19 spread occurs.




This multiagent model -field in which López works-, represents a population with different profiles: healthy, infected and immune. A graphic shows how such population evolves over time in different sit...

Speech droplets generated by asymptomatic carriers of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) are increasingly considered to be a likely mode of disease transmission. Highly sensitive laser light scattering observations have revealed that loud speech can emit thousands of oral fluid droplets per second. In a closed, stagnant air environment, they disappear from the window of view with time constants in the range of 8 to 14 min, which corresponds to droplet nuclei of c...

Immune warriors known as T cells help us fight some viruses, but their importance for battling SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has been unclear. Now, two new studies reveal that infected people harbor T cells that target the virus—and may help them recover. Both studies also found that some people never infected with SARS-CoV-2 have these cellular defenses, most likely because they were previously infected with other coronaviruses.

“This is encouraging data,” says virol...

Turning ventilated patients onto their stomachs, called proning, helps them by opening their lungs. Now doctors are testing to see if it can keep others off ventilators altogether.
The surprisingly low-tech concept, called proning, can improve breathing in patients stricken by the respiratory distress that is the hallmark of the virus, doctors have found. It draws from basic principles of physiology and gravity. Lying on one’s stomach helps open airways in lungs that have become compressed...

The Bergamo province, which is extensively affected by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) epidemic, is a natural observatory of virus manifestations in the general population. In the past month we recorded an outbreak of Kawasaki disease; we aimed to evaluate incidence and features of patients with Kawasaki-like disease diagnosed during the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic.
In the past month we found a 30-fold increased incidence of Kawasaki-like disease. Children diagnose...

131 million women give birth annually. This population is particularly vulnerable to emerging infectious pathogens due to alterations in immune, respiratory, and cardiovascular physiology that occur during pregnancy. Early data regarding pregnancy outcomes in COVID-19 are reassuring: maternal outcomes are similar to non-pregnant adults, and vertical transmission and neonatal infection are rare.
However, pregnant women remain at risk of severe disease requiring intensive care, and they dese...

The pandemic has given rise to too many small and uncontrolled clinical trials.



Researchers have rallied in unprecedented ways to defeat the coronavirus pandemic. They are retooling laboratories to focus on the virus; helping with testing efforts; and, in the case of clinician–researchers, working feverishly to carry out research studies while also treating patients in overwhelmed health-care systems.




Some clinical trials — such as the World Health Organizati...

Coronaviruses make use of a large envelope protein called spike (S) to engage host cell receptors and catalyze membrane fusion. Because of the vital role that these S proteins play, they represent a vulnerable target for the development of therapeutics. Here, we describe the isolation of single-domain antibodies (VHHs) from a llama immunized with prefusion-stabilized coronavirus spikes. These VHHs neutralize MERS-CoV or SARS-CoV-1 S pseudotyped viruses, respectively. Crystal structures of...

Abstract
Neutralizing antibodies could be antivirals against COVID-19 pandemics. Here, we report isolation of four human-origin monoclonal antibodies from a convalescent patient, all of which display neutralization abilities. B38 and H4 block the binding between virus S-protein RBD and cellular receptor ACE2. A competition assay indicates their different epitopes on the RBD, making them a potential virus-targeting MAb-pair to avoid immune escape in future clinical applications. Moreove...